HEALTH SCIENCES
Assessing new health care provisions
Hindrik Vondeling came to the University as Professor in the fall of 2009. His research contributes to the profile of University of Twente in the discipline of Health Sciences. Since his appointment, he has taught in the Bachelor and Masters' programme in Health Sciences, coordinated by the Department of Health, Technology, and Services Research (HTSR), where his strong desire to positively affect health care policies and practice is apparent.
His current research focuses on several aspects of modern health technologies, aimed at informing decision making. He emphasizes the contribution of health economics, in particular economic evaluation of health care programmes, in this process. He has initiated policy analyses at the national and institutional level and its results have offered suggestions on how to provide optimal support to organisations providing medical services to the general public.
In the coming year, initial results are expected from his contribution to a research project co-financed by the European Union on the topic of public health genomics. His teams' investigation is focused on the development and timely assessment of new provisions in health care based on genomic technologies and genomic information. This field of research could help to support the collaboration between general practitioners and hospitals, governments and health care insurance providers, and medical technology manufacturers, based on the notion of "personalised medicine".
"Significant amounts of money are being spent in the area of health care which creates a growing need to examine new health technologies, as these are one of the main drivers of increased spending. Health care can make the difference between life and death, and by providing quality care to patients, it can greatly reduce suffering", said Vondeling who studied biology at the University of Groningen. He also held an associate professorship position in Health Technology Assessment at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense.
Janine van Til Assistant professor HTSR
Intervening the transition from acute to chronic pain
PhD Candidate Jorien Pierik started studying Life Science and Technology at the University of Groningen and earned her Master of Science degree in Medical Pharmaceutical Science. Since September 2010, she has started her PhD research at the Department of Health Technology and Services Research.
"Acute pain", she recognises, "is one of the primary complaints of patients in the emergency medical services. For some emergency care patients this acute pain is the onset for the development of chronic pain."
What's more, she goes on to say," unrelieved chronic pain in patients represents a major problem not only for individual patients but creates a socio-economic burden for health service providers and society at large." Another imperative factor she mentions is that "chronic pain attributes to higher incidence of depression, psychological dysfunction, prolonged periods of disability and dependency on drugs."
In the long term, Pierik's research can lead to ready solutions to reduce chronic pain and associated overuse of medical services, lessening the burden on taxpayers who have to foot the bill for social security payments and unemployment costs. She proposes in her study to examine early detection of risk factors for chronic pain and the possibilities to adopt appropriate preventive strategies.
Her research results on the feasibility of intervention to prevent chronic pain in patients will be known within four years, subsequent to her theoretical work, she plans to observe and follow patients with acute pain over a twelve-month time period to determine who will transition from acute to chronic pain.
Pierik's research is performed in cooperation with local health care providers, including the Emergency Department of Medisch Spectrum Twente in Enschede, and the Biomedical Signals and Systems group at the University of Twente. Her research is supervised by Professor Maarten IJzerman and Dr. Carine Doggen at the University of Twente. Visit the School and Management Governance website to learn more about her research.
Designing models of patient preferences
Karin Groothuis-Oudshoorn, a biostatistician and assistant professor, is a methodologist member of the Medical Ethical Committee Twente.
In two case studies, she examined the possibilities of monitoring patient preferences. Her first study took a look at patient preferences of hearing aid devices for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. While her other study examined the use of telemedicine services in patients with chronic pain for the Roessingh Rehabilitation Centre in Enschede.
"We used discrete choice experiments to weigh and rank the different characteristics of administering certain treatments, drugs or devices, keeping in mind patient preferences," she explains. Her main contribution was to the methodological side of the study where she analyzed the data using econometric models.
The societal impact of her work might lead the way to the development of new treatments, tools or medicines that can contribute to a higher patient adherence to therapies. This year, she plans to submit the results of her studies to academic journals.
In 2010, along with other fellow researchers, she published a paper to measure the "quality of life" in stroke subjects who had received an implanted neural prosthesis for drop foot. Click here.